A Woman Walks Home Alone At Night

In a horror film, the sight of a woman alone fills us with dread. We expect terrible things to happen to her. But she also fills us with a sense of supernatural expectation.

In Alex Garland’s new horror film Men, the recently widowed Harper, played by Jessie Buckley, rents an isolated 500-year-old house in a pastoral part of England, trying to heal after her husband kills himself. Early in her trip, she takes a walk in the verdant forest and comes across a tunnel. As the viewers, we know she is in a horror film and should not enter it. But Harper, oblivious, steps inside the tunnel and calls out to hear her echo. Then she begins adding different notes to her echo, creating a melody so pretty, she laughs in delight. The idyll is ruined when she sees the figure of a man at the end of the tunnel. The man lets out a cry and begins sprinting toward Harper, and she turns and flees in confusion. In horror films, women are so often hunted as prey. All that is needed to create this dynamic is the mere presence of a man.

Harper experiences difficulty any moment she is alone. Although solitude is what she is after, the men she keeps encountering shun her for being without a man and challenge her for rejecting her role as a wife. They insist it was her duty to care for her husband. When Harper confides in a priest about her husband’s suicide, he tells Harper she is responsible for it. This is one of the most unsettling aspects of the film—the cringy invasiveness of men who criticize a woman simply for being single. They make sneering comments. They look at her with both lust and disgust. One drops the word miss as though it is a slur. It is as though, without a husband’s sexual boundaries around her, she doesn’t have any at all. But, coming from an emotionally manipulative and abusive relationship, Harper knows the walls that men put around you can be a prison rather than a form of protection.

The men she encounters keep sending her running back home to her isolated rental cottage. Horror films know they need to place the woman at home, or in a domestic setting, where our bodies know instinctively that true horror against women happens. The home is a supernatural space where a woman is unprotected by society and no one can hear her, no matter how loud she screams.

Once when I was young, two police officers banged on the door of our apartment. They told my father the neighbor had called 911 and had claimed the man upstairs was beating his daughter. This was precisely what had been happening. Our downstairs neighbor was an elderly woman who lived alone, had mismatching clothes, and wore headscarves on her balding head. My dad told the police that the woman was lonely and old and crazy. The officers nodded, did not ask me any questions, and left.

The words of single women and children have no worth in society, particularly when it comes to recounting testimonies of abuse.

A woman being disbelieved is a constant trope in horror films. What is more alienating than no one believing your lived reality? In Rosemary’s Baby, Mia Farrow tries and fails to convince a doctor that her pregnancy is not normal. In The Others, Nicole Kidman can’t get her servants to believe the house is haunted. And in Aliens, Sigourney Weaver’s male bosses doubt her when she tells them that she saw alien pods. This disbelief becomes the entire premise of Leigh Whannell’s 2020 film Invisible Man. Cecilia, played by Elisabeth Moss, leaves her abusive husband, who then kills himself. She moves in with an old friend and, with the support of her sister, begins to feel good about herself and safe again. She feels the thrill of independence and agency of life without a man.

We know so little about what a single woman’s life could look like without romance at the center of it.

But then it becomes clear to Cecilia that her husband is still around, albeit somehow invisible. Not even his spirit can stand that she might be satisfied alone. He terrorizes her psychologically and physically, ruining her job prospects and alienating her friends. In the absence of any evidence, no one can depend on Cecilia’s word alone. As a single woman, everything she says is suspect.

When we watch a horror film, the sight of a woman alone fills us with dread. We expect terrible things to happen to her. But she also fills us with a sense of supernatural expectation, because we know so little about what a single woman’s trajectory in life could possibly look like, without romance at the center of it. In days of yore, the woman alone would have been tied up and tossed in a river, nominally to ascertain whether she was a witch, but more simply just to get rid of her. Culturally, she remains an uneasy figure. It is not only men that are made uncomfortable by the idea of a woman existing beyond relationships—for women themselves this is an uncharted land.

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My first relationship was with a man who developed an increasing and disturbing dependency on heroin. Eventually, I threw him out of my apartment and called his family, begging them to help me get him out of my life. His mother sent him to a rehabilitation facility, and he returned to the city six months later. When he called and asked to see me, I flatly refused. I had a daughter to raise. I had to raise myself out of poverty. I was not going to take on his monsters and demons or throw my love down an empty hole of masculine need. I was too curious about what my own story would be. And I literally wanted to be a writer, a teller of my own stories. I chose to be single.

Like Harper, I never doubted my choice. But for many years, his mother told me that I was responsible for the relapse that led to his eventual death. This never made any sense to me, but I suppose it was repeated in hopes it would sink in: that it is a woman’s duty to prioritize the needs of everyone around her over her own. That a woman who chooses to be single is in some way betraying someone in need.

I refused to commit to a relationship with a man after that. Marriage or any sort of cohabitation remained off the table. I could not put myself in that vulnerable situation again. But while that traumatizing relationship was a factor, my desire to be alone also had to do with creativity. Men often have a covetous relationship toward women’s time. I once had a boyfriend who would wrestle my notebooks out of my hands and throw them in the garbage, demanding I pay more attention to him. And creativity and invention in any field requires a certain uninterrupted period of reflection. Men is very aware of this. Throughout the film, the score has an echoey quality as though it was all recorded in the tunnel where Harper first finds herself. And at one point, the melody she created in the tunnel actually begins to play with instruments and voices. It is always there, her creativity, and it is what she is fighting for. But it is constantly under threat, from a masked little boy demanding she play with him to an encounter with a man who has branches growing out of his eyes and mouth. For a woman, it’s never easy getting to a place of solitude.

I went to see a therapist once and asked her, “What would it be like for me to spend my life alone?” It seemed like such an extreme decision for a young woman to make, given all of society’s messaging, that I wanted some reassurance that it was normal.

She shook her head and said, “That will never happen to you. You will meet someone.” I prodded her, asking, but what if I chose to stay alone. She refused to even entertain this dreadful possibility.

“It’s what humans do,” she said. “They couple.” Like I did not have free will and was just an animal subject to mating patterns. “There is nothing wrong with you, and you are young. It is very, very hard for single women in this world.”

I was very disturbed by the fact that a therapist, who had explored the depths of her patients’ anxieties, could not imagine a woman alone.

In her review of Men for The Cut, Angelica Jade Bastién writes, “Garland renders misogyny airless, reduced to a primal issue rather than one that is man-made.” Fair. But I liked that it addresses this assumption of natural roles between men and women. In our society, a woman’s value has traditionally come from her ability to keep a man happy and in a state of domestic bliss. This ability is not seen as a choice, but as a natural result of the feminine desire to nurture. Men explores this idea’s horrific connotations. An apple tree begins raining apples, a widespread symbol of fertility, that bounce around the yard like vicious, beautiful hail. A man begins to give birth to himself from his anus. Harper always pauses to meditate on these metaphors, as if she has to understand them before she can escape her psychic prison—the guilt and grief of her marriage ending—and be free of this bond.

And let’s face it, being in a relationship can feel like taking drugs. Your body experiences physical withdrawal after an intimate relationship ends, which makes it so hard not to return to it. Relationships chill your brain out and leave you in a pleasurable daze. When I left my first relationship, I had so much excess intellectual energy that I began reading a book a night. I scribbled philosophical notes and pinned them on the wall, right on the verge of discovering the meaning of life. I wrote Sadean sex scenes in my novels that lasted thirty pages. Pondered the lives of celebrities as though they were Gods and I were a theologian. If you can tame this beast that is the female imagination, you can create wonderful things. But it’s a slippery slope and can easily turn into madness.

When I left my first relationship, I had so much excess intellectual energy that I began reading a book a night.

In Rose Glass’s 2021 film, Saint Maud, the titular character succumbs to the madness and pressure of isolation. Maud, a young nurse, lives alone in a squalid tiny apartment. After experiencing a trauma, she is left to deal with the psychological consequences on her own. Because she is a single woman, she has no societal support. At one point, a friend comes to visit her and apologizes for never checking in. But by then it is way too late.

Maud begins talking to herself. She begins hearing the voice of God and fashioning her own sort of path toward sainthood, one that involves putting nails in her Converse sneakers and walking on the boardwalk. At one point her body is lifted up off the floor of her apartment, her skinny back arched and her sneakers dangling underneath her. It’s one of those fabulous grotesque images that make horror films sublime and extend into the realm of metaphor in a way the visceral gritty realism of thrillers cannot. Because she is the only witness to her own life and suffering, she decides to exist in the male gaze of the Lord, who turns out to be a dangerous partner.

Harper in Men is trying to travel this uncharted path of female solitude. She has more fortitude and maturity than Maud and knows there is an imaginative hurdle to clear for a woman to learn how to be alone. Her friend offers to come and stay with her, but Harper refuses the company. She has come to be by herself, and she is going to work through the terror of it. This is one of my favorite aspects of horror films—when a character is pulled toward the darkness of their self to find out what it contains.

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And indeed, a woman’s loneliness is sometimes presented as a source of empowerment. Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 film, A Girl Walks Alone at Night, follows a young woman who haunts the streets of a desolate Iranian city. There’s a scene of her skateboarding down the street, her chador flying like a cape behind her. It is eerie and beautiful to see a girl skateboarding at night. Here is a girl who is not at all afraid to be in the dark alone. Her calm is so unsettling. It destabilizes everyone who sees her.

In another scene, we observe a drug dealer exploiting a prostitute in a car. He invites the mysterious girl to his home, which is decorated with the trophy heads of gazelles on his walls, indicating his predatory nature. The tables are turned abruptly when the girl, a vampire, bites his finger off.

Women are meant to be afraid at all times. We walk down the street and we glance all around us. We jump at shadows. When I was the same age as that vampire, I frequently ran away from home. I took every sort of risk I could. I hitchhiked. I peed in alleyways. I slept in the bushes in the park on pieces of cardboard.

But I was never really afraid, because being outside was never as dangerous as being inside. I had been beaten by a chair so hard I couldn’t walk. What could possibly happen to me outside? I would often encounter other runaway girls like myself who would amble down alleyways, looking for a place to hide or sleep.

I still roam the streets at night. People are always trying to infringe on a woman’s time and attention during the day. When you come alive at night, men can’t expect any domestic duties or demand emotional labor. It’s in the domestic realm of horror where I have suffered abuse. But there is a place in the darkness where it is delightful to exist as a woman. And the serial killers haven’t been able to catch me yet.